Day Break New Mark, 14″ x 11″, UART 320

Underpainting stage 1

Underpainting, stage 2

In anticipation of tomorrow’s “Cloud Workshop”, I spent several lovely hours in my public studio painting an early morning picture from the neighborhood (New Mark Commons development in Rockville, MD).  Once July arrived, I started taking early morning walks and have seen amazing skies filled with altocumulous clouds.  In this picture, the sun was breaking out behind the townhouses on the lake and it was quite dramatic.  In this “summer of going nowhere” one has to take what one gets!

I did a very rough drawing of just the top and bottom of the dark areas.  I saw it as one big shape of dark with sky holes and light subtle indications of windows and roofs, etc.  For the underpainting I chose a green for the sky areas and then a violet and orange for under the clouds.  I’m really NOT sure why!  I don’t particularly recommend the orange as I had to work hard to cover it all up.  But, at least wasn’t hard to do. For the dark mass in the middle, I used a combination of bottle green, dark blue, red and brown.  Made a lovely black!  So the underpainting took very little time.  It’s not the loveliest I’ve ever done, but it worked–quickly establishing shapes and giving me something to work over.

For the clouds, I first started with blues, but then realized I needed to have violet to set of the yellows of the sun.  So they are various shades of violets, mainly Great Americans, I think.  The sky is a combination of blue and green.  For the clouds on the right, I put in a lighter violet then yellow on top, to show light and shadow.

The major problem with this painting was not having enough room!  Once I started drawing in the roofs and houses and reflections I was afraid I wouldn’t have a bottom!  So I tried to make the houses smaller and ended up with enough of the sky reflection in the water.

For the trees, I started with a Ludwig “eggplant” and used some dark warm green over. In the area where the sun is shining over the tree, I began with some warm oranges, then a yellow green very lightly applied.  I added various yellows and oranges and blues in the sky holes.

For the houses, I really wanted to keep them very loose.  I paid attention to the angle of the roofs and having a lighter color house with a darker roof, etc. but for for the windows, they are just pieces of lighter browns and blues that I then added to the reflections in the water.  I’m pretty happy with the effect.  I want it to be clear that these are townhouses on a lake but I didn’t care about all the details.  (I joked to my friend who I was painting with that I was tempted to paint one of the roofs pink.  My husband is in charge of the architectural review committee in our community, which is on the National Register, and certainly NO pink roofs would be allowable!)

There is a pump in the lake which causes the ripples in the water.  This was one of the more challenging things –I thought–about the picture.  However, I found that using diagonal strokes of the dark violet, blue sky, and yellow clouds worked fine and gave the effect of moving water.

This was a very quick painting but a fun one to do.  Now, I’m totally out of inspiration.  It’s muggy, horrible, mid summer weather.  I hope many of my readers are in nicer climates or  have been able to get away to some type of vacation destination–although I realize it’s doubtful!  Perhaps it’s time for still life!